Information Overload: How Students Consume Media

Media, news, information, data, whatever you call it, we are surrounded by it every day. Yet with the changes in media culture we’ve experienced over the last several years, the ways we consume media has also changed. Especially for students.

Oklahoma State was one of 11 universities that participated in a study about students’ news consumption habits. The study was done through Project Information Literacy, a nonprofit research institute that, according to the group’s website, “conducts ongoing, national studies on what it is like being a student in the digital age.” The OSU Library had the unique opportunity to serve as the liaison between OSU and the authors of the study.

While many people, myself included, might assume that most college students obtain the news through social media, the study found that most students are “multi-modal.” This means they consume media through social media, online newspapers and discussions with peers and professors.

The report details five big takeaways from the research, including a summary of the various pathways millennials take to get the news, and how and why students share news on social media.

The findings are followed by recommendations and solutions made by journalists, librarians and educators. One of the most important and interesting solutions, in my opinion, is teaching students from an early age to read the news critically and ask questions in order to develop “mental and intellectual frameworks for credibility testing of information,” (Head, Wihbey, Metaxas, MacMillan, & Cohen, 2018).

Matt Upson, the director of undergraduate instruction and outreach services at the library, believes that teaching students to evaluate the news is crucial to their understanding of their world.

“Traditional media is often portrayed as 'fake news,' and the nature of social media often prevents us from figuring out exactly where our information is coming from,” Upson said. “It can be easy to confuse what’s misinformation and what’s true.”

He hopes that the librarians, faculty and staff at OSU can create a supportive environment where students can continue reading and digesting the news in an informed manner.

“Students are interested in news; they want to share it, to be participants, to make a difference,” he said. “How can we help them do that and be more effective and efficient users of media?”

Teaching students to critically read the news and ask questions provides them with a foundation to consume information analytically and think for themselves. It is our responsibility as consumers to engage with the news. We cannot turn a blind eye to the events around us, but we cannot blindly accept everything we read, either.

This study is incredibly important for students, journalists, educators and librarians. If you’re interested in reading more about this study, you can find the full report at www.projectinfolit.org.

Sources:
Head, A. J., Wihbey, J., Metaxas, P., MacMillan, M., & Cohen, D. (2018, October). How Students Engage with News: Five Takeaways for Educators, Journalists, and Librarians (Rep.). Retrieved http://www.projectinfolit.org/uploads/2/7/5/4/27541717/newsexecutivesummary.pdf

Posted by Jenny Berry, electronic communications intern

Environmental Scan Presentation

Library employees may find the slides used for the Environmental Scan work group presentation on May 7 at U:LibraryFutures\ or the Library's intranet. 

Comments and questions on these notes can be added to the comments section below.

The work group also recommends the following links: 
Research Games (Texas A&M): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-hmcx99Kks 
University of Arizona Video Contest: http://www.library.arizona.edu/video-contest 
My Hunt Library Photos (NCSU): http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/myhuntlibrary

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day Two

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Near the end of the conference we heard from the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, Lorraine Harricombe. She shared the process on the KU campus for creating a campus-wide open access policy and adoption of the institutional repository. Over two years the library worked closely with the Provost’s office and faculty council to write and adopt an open access policy that encourages authors to maintain at least some of their copyright and deposit their work into the institutional repository at KU, known as KU ScholarWorks.

The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion made up of Kevin Droegemeier, the OU VP of Research, and Jerry Malayer from the OSU Center for Veterinary Health Sciences. The discussion ranged across all the topics covered in the conference, but focused largely on bringing OU and OSU together to work on addressing the need for more robust and fully supported institutional repositories as well as open access policies for our campuses and better support for our researchers and authors when they want to use or publish open access resources.

The conference was wonderful and the conversation has only started. Many questions still need to be answered. If you are interested in Nicole’s notes from the conference she would be glad to share them. Just let her know.

What opportunities do you see for collaboration across the state? What does OSU have to offer that is unique?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Day One Continues

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

Continued from “Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome & Opening Remarks
The other speakers were wonderful too. We heard from Jennifer Lin from the Public Library of Science (PLoS). She talked about Article Level Metric or ALMs which allow authors to see (at varying degrees of granularity)

• how often their article is viewed and/or downloaded,
• which countries the readers are from,
• comments, tweets,
• citations, referring URLs
• and more.

ALMs are a great way to convince faculty of the benefits of OA in terms of widening their audience. These sentiments were echoed by University of Kansas Professor, Marc Greenburg.

Some speakers touched on the idea of copyright in the world of Open Access. Michael Carroll, American University Law Professor, evangelized on the necessity of authors maintaining at least some of their rights to the articles they write. Publishers often ask authors to give all of their copyright to the publisher. By holding on to some of their rights authors can share their work freely and deposit their work in the university’s institutional repository.

Carroll also talked about the Creative Commons license which allows the original author to maintain their copyright but gives others permission to repost and use their work as long as the author receives credit or attribution.

Mark Morvant from OU’s Center for Teaching Excellence talked about open access course materials. Open Education Resources or OERs give faculty the freedom to customize their curriculum, because they aren’t dependent on a textbook. Additionally students are spared the punishing costs charged by some textbook publishers. Because using OERs is more work for faculty the Center for Teaching Excellence at OU is offering support and education for faculty who want to use open access materials for their classes.

How can the library help faculty adopt open access and protect their copyright?

“Open Conversations about Open Access” Welcome

Contributed by Nicole Sump-Crethar

The “Open Conversations about Open Access” conference started some exciting conversations. Rick Luce, Dean of Libraries at OU introduced the speakers for the conference as his “Open Access Dream Team.” In his introduction he included a little about his vision of Open Access.
Open access (sometimes abbreviated as OA) is “the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. OA is also increasingly being provided to theses, scholarly monographs and book chapters,” according to Wikipedia. Luce went on to describe how OA should look to readers, authors and to the university.

• Readers should see OA as immediate, free, worldwide access.
• Authors should be able to protect their traditional rights.
• The university should see open access as an extension of their mission where works created at the university should be used for the greatest possible benefit and should stimulate innovation.

The first speaker on Thursday, Heather Joseph, the executive director for The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition or SPARC, kicked off the meeting with an overview of where open access started and how far it has come in terms of acceptance in the scholarly community and in national legislation and regulation. She described the situation we are already familiar with here at OSU. Budgets continue to shrink while costs continue to rise at a faster pace than inflation. Happily, recent legislation followed by some important regulations at the federal level are requiring researchers who receive funding from government agencies to make their research available to the public. In essence, if taxpayers fund the research, then taxpayers should have free and open access to that research.

Joseph also talked about the current state of OA publishing in terms of infrastructure and popularity. For example, the Directory of Open Access Journals offers 8,600 journals in nearly every discipline imaginable.

What are your perceptions of open access? What do you think the perception of open access is on our campus?

Slides for Miller and Schottlaender

Library employees may find the slides from Rush Miller's and Brian Schottlaender's Sept. 26 presentations to the staff and faculty on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\ or via Sharepoint. 

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.

July 31-Slides

Library employees may find the slides from Raynna's July 31 presentation to the staff and faculty can be found on the staff drive at U:LibraryFutures\Raynna2012_07_31.pdf or via Sharepoint.

Comments and questions on the presentation can be added to the comments section below.